Sleep is vital to our survival as human beings. Without it, one can suffer from sluggishness and slow response time, at the very least. In extreme cases, where sleep has been lost for a huge amount of time, we can experience severe motor ability dysfunction, incoherence, hallucinations, and other psychological and physiological impairments. A healthy sleep regimen is vital to a healthy quality of life. And while many people do not get a healthy amount of sleep, they also do not realize the extreme consequences that it can have on the body. I decided to test the effects of sleep deprivation on myself in a very informal manner so that I could see how it affects my behavior, motor ability, mood, and temperament. In high school, I was able to go for days without sleeping because I had to do enough homework every night that I was forced to choose between sleep and my grade point average. The most I had ever gone without sleep was probably around forty hours. When your body is “used to” a certain amount of sleep, this can be a very easy thing to do. An average human is supposed to sleep seven or eight hours a night. When you lose sleep, you can partially make up for it by resting as much as you need as soon as possible, but you will not completely get back the hours you lost and repair the damage you have caused to your body. This may not be noticeable immediately but consider the effects of not eating on your body. You are first hungry, then starving. While there is much debate on whether or not sleep deprivation can kill you, there is no debate on whether or not it can have serous medical side effects—it can. With this knowledge in hand, I decided to attempt to not sleep for a full forty-eight hours for my experiment. It seemed just long enough to gather the feelings of sleep deprivation but not so long that I would be in the range of serious medical risks. I had originally planned to attempt to not sleep for seventy-two hours, however, the day I was originally supposed to begin my experiment, I ended up in the doctor’s office with chest pain. My medical issue was not as serious as it sounded, but I did decide to postpone the experiment in lieu of my visit to the doctor. The next available window that I had the free time to complete the experiment—as I did not want it to interfere with my exam or work schedule—I only had a forty-eight hour window. I decided that this was an adequate rescheduling of my experiment. In order to record the effects of sleep deprivation on my body, I decided to record how long I could stand on my left foot, the time it took to read the same passage from Tolkein’s The Hobbit, and write my name down every three hours. This was my father’s idea. When I first told him of my presumably outrageous experiment, his first question had been: “How are you going to test it?” Apparently, writing down my feelings over the course of forty-eight hours of no sleep was not a well-designed experiment according to his standards. I woke up at nine in the morning on Tuesday March 25th, as I usually do. The first few hours were completely normal, considering that I had gotten my usual regimen of sleep the previous night. Later on, however, I had missed my naptime and was feeling extremely lazy. At about fifteen hours into the experiment, I just felt absolutely unproductive. My memory was slightly fuzzy, but that could have been from a multitude of things including stress (as I had an exam earlier that day). I was not sleepy yet, but I was definitely tired. I had been going through a normal, busy day and that was tiring. Almost everyone’s day feels exhausting by the time midnight rolls around. By the time three in the morning rolled around, I was feeling very unmotivated and sluggish. I was also extremely bored. Movie marathons and painting can only keep you awake for so long, and I was seriously considering taking a nap. The conflict I was having was between giving into desire and impulse versus being disciplined. I wanted to stay awake for the sake of the experiment but I wanted to sleep, and the desire to sleep was slowly taking over the desire to continue. The major setback of my experiment was that I did not have a companion to help me stay awake. Likewise, I was not forced to do anything other than record my responses to the tasks I had set up for myself. As a result, I made it about twenty-two hours before I accidentally fell asleep watching a movie. The heater in my house had broken, unbeknownst to me. It was so cold that my hands hurt. I had crawled into bed in an effort to get warm. I did warm myself, but I also fell asleep. I slept for only about three or four hours, with brief periods of waking throughout. Consequently, I woke up severely angry with myself. While this was not enough time to note any large changes in motor function, I did notice that I was processing thoughts much more slowly, I was more prone to mood swings, and at the very least I moved more slowly than I normally did. With this realization, I decided to continue not sleeping and see how it affected my mood and body without recording the initial tests that I had prepared anymore. I realized that I had skewed the data by sleeping even a little. I had originally prepared for my boyfriend to take me to class thirty-three and a half hours into the experiment, because my motor functions would have been severely decreased. I kept that appointment. Even though I had slept a couple of hours that morning, I was still technically sleep deprived and considering that my body was used to sleeping an average of nine hours a night, I was definitely feeling the effects of at least mild sleep deprivation. Not sleeping can be likened to waging an endless war with your natural drives—we are programmed to need sleep just as we are programmed to need food. Not sleeping is basically depriving your body of one of its most important needs. Telling yourself that you are not “allowed” to do one of your most basic functions is absolutely miserable. It is a constant uphill battle with your mind and body—one that I had forgotten through spoiling myself with an average of nine hours of sleep a night during my past two college years. While I call this “spoiling,” some may call it “being healthy.” Truth be told, I was healthier once I was able to sleep more, but I also tended to oversleep on occasion. It was as if my body was recuperating for the past four to seven years of not being able to sleep. The only downside to this is that I was subsequently more lazy and unproductive than I had been in high school. “Once we get coffee in you, you’ll feel totally fine.” This was our mantra of the day. And truth be told, once I did have coffee I did feel “fine.” But I could tell that it was a charade, as if my body was attempting to trick itself into thinking that this was the norm, as if caffeine would solve all of the consequences that I had inflicted upon myself by not sleeping. I felt alert and awake, but my body was not completely functioning at its norm. I felt as if I were floating. And the fact that I was reliant upon others to watch out for me and make sure I was safe was frankly annoying because I felt like a burden. My yoga instructor that night told me a story of how her roommate didn’t sleep for forty-eight hours and ended up in the hospital because of a caffeine overdose or something like that. She kept urging me to sleep, and I kept laughing it off. I was honestly laughing at everything and everyone by that point. When a friend would ask me a question, I would not be able to really respond and would instead just kind of laugh while my brain caught up with forming an answer. Physical activity was especially tiring. Throughout the hour and a half yoga session, I paused multiple times simply because my body would not push itself to continue. By the time the class was out, I was about thirty-six hours into the experiment. My mother had called me three times, texted me six times, and had my sister text me twice during the yoga session. I suppose that she had completely forgotten that I was in yoga, as I was every Wednesday, and had gotten worried that I had died or something absurd like that. This just made me irritated. While the constant buzzing of my phone would have been an annoyance anyway, the lack of sleep did not allow me to be able to respond to her messages as quickly as I wanted to. The whole situation just caused me to be angry with myself but also with them for bothering me. When I returned home, I sat on the floor of my living room, with my roommates all around me chatting, simply so that I could attempt to be social so that I could stay awake. I ended up just staring at the floor, not speaking, and not really thinking of much. When I got up to take a shower, one of them asked that I leave the door unlocked in case I fell asleep in the shower. While this was a good idea, it made me feel rather silly. My roommates did not normally pay me much attention, but it was the one I conversed with that was the most concerned, and so that made sense. And while I did not fall asleep during my bathing period, I completely forgot washing my face in the shower. I cannot even recall that now as I sit here composing this piece. I went to my room after the shower, so that I would not have to be social any longer. By twelve-thirty in the morning, approximately thirty-nine and a half hours into the experiment, I did not even feel the need to fight the urge to sleep anymore. It was as if my body had given up. It had resigned itself to its fate and was just going to stay awake in a rather delirious state. I put a movie on and stayed up for a few more hours and around three in the morning—approximately forty-two hours into the experiment—I decided to go to sleep. Everyone was informed of this experiment told me I was crazy for even considering it. But there are so many people who go without sleep, and do so on a regular basis. Would I do this experiment again? I probably would not, unless I absolutely had to. I am now used to a normal schedule of sleep, which occasionally borders on oversleeping. If I were back into my high school sleeping regimen, then perhaps I would be more willing to do this again. But for now, I will stick to sleeping nine to twelve hours a night.